Performance and Competitive Communication Update

5.17.2019

By The Fortnite Team

Hey folks!

This week we’re openly discussing critical bugs found over the weekend, new features, and our upcoming competitive-focused AMA.

Weekend Issues

Last week, we discovered a critical issue where players could become stuck in a vehicle and unable to exit. We made the choice to remove the root of the issue by disabling all vehicles, rather than electing to play through the Finals even with the bug. We felt that it was more fair to remove all vehicles to ensure players weren’t penalized for something outside of their control during the Finals.

Due to a critical issue with players getting stuck inside vehicles, we will be disabling all vehicles in Arena and Fortnite World Cup Online Opens through this weekend. We plan on re-enabling vehicles in the Tournament and Arena playlists next week after our fix is implemented in the v9.10 update.

We also discovered several audio issues where, in certain situations, gun-fire was ducking building sounds, and player landing sound could be silenced if players landed at a certain velocity. Thanks to a bug report and replay files provided by CouRage, these audio bugs were triaged and will also be fixed in the upcoming 9.10 release alongside other audio improvements.

Disconnecting Duos Update

In last week’s communication blog, we spoke to the disconnecting duo issue experienced by a small number of duo teams in the Fortnite World Cup Online Open. For this weekend, we’ve changed the game logic of how disconnecting duos work.

In Week 6, players who have their duo disconnect while loading into the pre-match island will be able to leave the match without penalty prior to the Battle Bus launching. Once the Bus launches, the team will have the match count to decide if the solo remaining player decides to stay.

For future duo tournament weekends, we are working to add in game messaging to make this decision crystal clear. We hope to have this implemented in a future update by the next duos weekend.

Upcoming Balance Adjustments

It’s important that we do better moving forward when explaining intent for various changes within Battle Royale. Starting with the v9.01 patch notes, we are working to give extra context when we make significant game changes.

This week, we made changes to the Drum Gun, Baller, Compact SMG, and Slipstreams. Hop into the patch notes for some insight into these adjustments.

Hold to Swap

We initially added this feature to help improve early game looting, making it easier to get weapons & items in the slots that you wanted. We’ve fixed some bugs and iterated on this feature since its release, but recognize that some players may not want it enabled at all.

With an upcoming release, we’ll be making “Hold to Swap” a settings option, giving you the choice.

Performance

This past Season 9 launch revealed several performance regressions on Console, Switch and Mobile. Since then, we’ve been conducting internal investigations in order to determine root causes and iterative changes we can make in each next release.

In the v9.01 release on Wednesday we included a few initial fixes such as improving level streaming for all platforms. Level streaming accelerates in-game level loading and results in blurry geometry being displayed less.

Through our work in progress for our next update (v9.10) and beyond, we are continuing performance efforts to improve level streaming on all platforms.

AMA

In addition to our weekly communications, we will be holding an AMA in the next few weeks on the Fortnite Competitive subreddit. This AMA will be specifically focused around questions regarding competitive Fortnite. We will share the time and date as we finalize the details.